Christa Pike is, however, not a convicted criminal whose crime could be downplayed. In 1995, when she was just 18 years old, she took part in the murder of Colleen Slemmer, a 19-year-old woman she had met at a vocational training centre in Knoxville. The victim was lured to a secluded spot, beaten and tortured before being killed. The case shocked America at the time due to its brutality. Pike was found guilty and sentenced to death in 1996. Her boyfriend at the time, Tadaryl Shipp, who was 17 at the time of the crime, avoided the death penalty because of his age and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
It is precisely Christa Pike’s age at the time of the crime that is now at the heart of part of the debate. She had just turned 18. Her lawyers point out that she would have been the only person executed in modern Tennessee for a crime committed at that age. Added to this is a particularly traumatic personal history, highlighted in her application for a pardon: repeated sexual abuse during childhood, neglect and severe trauma. Once incarcerated, Pike was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, amongst other conditions. Her defence team argues that these factors were not given sufficient consideration during her trial and at the sentencing stage.
The case therefore raises a question that goes far beyond Christa Pike’s individual circumstances: what significance does a sentence handed down thirty years ago still hold when the person due to be executed has spent the vast majority of her life in prison? And to what extent should a defendant’s trauma and psychiatric disorders be taken into account when imposing the death penalty?
Colleen Slemmer’s family and the Tennessee authorities, for their part, point to the extreme violence of the crime and the fact that the conviction was upheld following decades of legal proceedings. The victim’s mother opposed any clemency.
Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, had also refused, on 28 September, to commute Pike’s sentence to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Information on the death penalty
The execution had been officially set a year earlier by the Tennessee Supreme Court for 30 September 2026. The prison service had even designated the journalists authorised to attend and organised their reception at the high-security Riverbend Prison in Nashville. Tennessee courts
Then, on Wednesday, there was a dramatic turnaround: the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit granted a temporary stay to consider an appeal concerning, in particular, the way in which the sexual abuse and trauma suffered by Pike had been taken into account at the time of his sentencing. The Attorney General of Tennessee immediately asked the US Supreme Court to lift this stay. At the time of going to press, her execution had therefore not taken place and her legal fate remains pending the courts’ decisions.
The case is all the more exceptional given that the execution of women remains extremely rare in the United States. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the 1970s, only 18 women have been executed, compared with more than 1,600 people in total. Christa Pike is also the only woman currently on death row in Tennessee.
Thirty years after the murder of Colleen Slemmer, two stories thus continue to stand in stark contrast: that of a 19-year-old woman whose life was brutally cut short in 1995, and that of a convicted prisoner who, having entered death row barely out of her teens, has spent three decades there. The last-minute stay of execution resolves none of these issues. It merely postpones, yet again, the moment when the American justice system must decide whether Christa Pike should indeed die for the crime she committed when she was 18.
